Oksana Zabuzhko: The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

“Oh, the whore school? I didn’t know you’d been apprised. No, they decided to hold off in the run-up to the elections, wait until after. Rumor has it, someone leaked to the opposition that it’s bankrolled by the porn-industry sharks, and the money trail goes all the way to the top, and the administration has no interest in another scandal; they know they’ll have enough egg on their face as it is. Did you catch the Mukachevo story?”

“Yeah, I did.”

So, Daryna thinks, Vadym drew his own conclusions from their conversation. The opposition—of course, he is a member of the opposition, isn’t he? Probably made a pretty penny on the whole thing, too: the new owners of the channel would pay for his silence regardless of whether this came to them as a friendly warning or a piece of light blackmail. The important thing is that they’ve held off with the show: stepped on the brakes, didn’t pursue it any further—Pavlo Ivanovych’s voice surfaces in her mind (file deleted)—and the hook was already cast.

Now she, too, has saved someone. Some nameless girls—the way Pavlo Ivanovych once saved her. Only, unlike herself, these girls will never find out what danger they were in. But that doesn’t matter—she’s done her job. In the run-up to the elections. Everything is now being done in the run-up to the elections, as if the end of the world has been scheduled for this one particular country, a plan for its final and irreversible subjugation by some dark forces. But it’s impossible, something in her protests: it’s absolutely impossible, how can anyone think this’ll happen, have they all gone insane—she’s having a child, for God’s sake!

“And you won’t hear a peep of it from our broadcast,” Antosha drones on. “Not a word about Mukachevo, everything’s hunkydory everywhere, the percentage of fat in butter is growing daily. Long story short, Dara, tell you what: you done good to cut out when you did. You, old witch, always had a nose better than a bloodhound—for people, for situations… we were just talking about it with the boys yesterday.”

That’s a compliment: she can almost see this conversation as it occurred in the smoking room. When you work with men, you don’t get to hope for any word of appreciation spoken to your face—they’re always watching you, waiting for you to make a misstep or just to lash out in irritation, something they can write off, among themselves, to your PMS or, better still, to your not getting any (and how would you know, she always wanted to ask these self-appointed he-men—have you fucked me?), and to restore, in that manner, their male dignity, which is chronically compromised by the presence of an independent, beautiful woman in any role other than that of an office girl. Over the years of working with them, Daryna has mastered a system of signals that must be constantly deployed, as though on a highway in hazardous conditions, to show that she is not crossing the white lines, not aiming to cut into “their” space, and depends, time after time, on their aid, being the weaker sex that she is, and only rarely, oh how rarely—she could count those occasions on the fingers of one hand—did she hear them give voice to what every last one of them must have secretly known: that she was the brains of the channel, its soul, and not merely its showy face, which could, with appropriate promotion, be just as easily replaced with someone else’s. And here it is—she’s lived to see it—belated, almost posthumous recognition sent in her wake. Nose better than a bloodhound’s—that’s their way of appreciating her now that they’ve had a chance to regret not quitting with her, the whole team together, when they could (and they could have, they had their chance—and it would have set precedent for their whole guild, and it would’ve been easier to get funding for VMOD-Film now!). Nose better than a bloodhound’s. That’s what it’s now called. Well, guys, I won’t turn it down.

No point belaboring this—no sense multiplying essences, as old Occam taught, and as Antosha likes repeating; Antosha, who always defends the basest among all likely motivations for anyone’s actions, maintaining that his chance of being wrong lies within the range of statistical error—and Daryna swipes Occam’s razor at him.

“Is that proper language? Mind your discourse, Antosha!”

“Well, I didn’t go to discoursing school, hon. You know, I’m a humble man—a shooter, as we used to say in school… but, fuck me, I’ve had enough. I’ve eaten so much shit in my Soviet days that when the same Komsomol-GB rats throw me back into it and go ‘give me ten!’ it makes me want to hurl, and booze don’t cure it anymore. Plus, one can’t be drunk his whole life!”

This is somewhat surprising, coming as it is from Antosha who always and everywhere had been the first to inquire whether drinks were included.

“So what, you looking for a job?”

“Yep. That, by the way, is why I’m calling you. Come on, out with it, is it true that you’ve bought out all the footage we got on Olena Dovganivna?”

Not I, she thinks. Vadym simply solved that problem too, while he was at it. He chatted with the guys, did them a favor, looked out for himself, and, well, didn’t forget her consult. Plus, threw her a bone to make sure she’d shut up, would never again drag Vlada’s skeleton out of his closet. No wonder he turned it all around so quickly, and without her having to remind him.

“Where’d you hear that, Antosha?”

“Not like it’s rocket science. Who other than you would want that stuff? It’s obvious whose little fingerprints are all over this. Spit it out, Sis. You got it?”

“I do.”

“You witch,” Antosha drops his second compliment in a row, with genuine pleasure, like a dollop of cream into her coffee. “And what are you going to do with it?”

That’s a good question, Daryna Goshchynska thinks. A very good question indeed. She would love to know the answer. Now that the life, passed on to her down the line from Gela Dovgan, smolders somewhere inside her, a not-yet-visible spark, and at this thought a smile rolls out, by itself, onto her lips: what if she went ahead and said into the phone, as she did to Adrian about an hour earlier, “You know, I’m pregnant”?

(No, that’s not how I told Adrian. I said, “You were right, you know,” and he knew it instantly from my voice, from the way it strained to contain the triumphant bulk of the secret knowledge that cannot really be shared with anyone, even with you, my most precious, my love, you whose touch I yearn for, while you, on the other end of the city, are choking on the uncontainable shock of this new joy, while I long for it like for a drink of water on a scorching day. It would be wonderful to have you by my side the whole time, holding my hand, but what I would like best right now is to fall asleep—sink into long, translucent daytime sleep, blissfully unhurried like rapid filming, like smoke rising from a fire in a summer orchard—languor-sleep, doze-sleep, the sweet stillness of the body stripped of will, with the mind dimmed like a lamp not quite turned off—sleep through which I could still sense your presence—you working in the kitchen, you out on the balcony, carrying something from one place to another, nailing, moving things—making a place for the baby, perhaps? Noises that blend with the lisping of rain outside and the whoosh of tires on wet asphalt, with flashes of sunlight that swim around the room from the balcony door when it opens, then closes—and then you dive in with me, under my blanket, hugging me from behind, and purr in a low voice so that even asleep I can feel how hot I am, how your penis instantly hardens pressing against my buttocks—my dreams will be here cut short and will later resume at the same point; the mechanic from the ancient club of my youth will glue the film back together, and on this parallel reel that has been running before my eyes the whole time, without ever obscuring the room around me, with its shifting light, the breath of the man I love and the rain outside, there will be Gela—it is with her I most want to share this; she is the one I want to call and say: come—